Tuesday, 2 March 2010

Now resting on my Grandad's farm near Brisbane, Queensland, Oz. There is completely nothing to do but read and speak to the old man about his life and learnings. And these are deep. Treasured slow times, so after the relative pace of NZ (which by many measures was pretty slow - though internally a riot) I'm slowing down my psyche in this purgatorybetween the old and new.

It feels like a new life was revealed to me in NZ. Of potential and enjoyment and what can be done if we only do it slow enough - just what miracles can be achieved. There's the sort of optimism only a blank slate can give you. Ideas for the novel polished and developing, ideas for how to fill my time after the 3.5 days a week at my large blue-lettered employer. Funny how opportunity can produce such anxiety. A problem grappledwith by our friends Heidegger "et Sartre" (though I've recently discovered Heidegger turned into a Nazi propogandist after being elected rector of Freiburg University, arguing that Germans were not concerned enough with great men and struggle).

Looking at the tip of this anxiety it appears to have a taste of "anti-being" - a fear projected into the future so as to cover all expectation of future action. It cannot accept that life brims from the finger tips of this one as he writes or sleeps or enjoys another simple day in an impossible life. This impossibility is just what perplexes the"anti-being". It's all happening without it. The alienation going on without a hint of involvement in the surrounding events. The alienation removes itself from the world, and once this is seen, is as fragile as a bubble that goes pop and up lurches the realisation that it was never apart anyway, a little flow of space time that folded in on itself and denied its own superb existence. A keen thing that, to see that it was never apart. The flow is and always will be the same.

Monday, 15 February 2010

Enough of these characters. I am a man not a writer. I am here in New Zealand. The people here call it AOTEAROA: The Land of Infinite Light.

I have been on islands and in cities. Heard the breathing of lakes, the heartbeat of a mountain. The latter is Mt. Ruapehu and I am camping at his base.

I am meeting Maori Wise Women and Masters of all colours: of dance, of music prepared to share their treasures and I sit like an empty box: receiving, receiving. Day by day turning into a new man.

I meet people like Rose Pere. She is a Tahuna a wisdom keeper and speaks with the strength and directness of a large stick. She is optimistic about people and their connection to the land that must be restored or we will go. Not the land. We.

I met Ojasvin, a dancing Master with his wife Iris who teach a Haka for Healing. They tell us to stand in joy and sing together.

Day by day, I also sit by my Guru, Prajnaparamita who is leading me on this trip. She speaks with a clarity and softness of feathers that can shatter bricks. I have many bricks and her words float around me and deconstruct me inside.

This is healing and out of this rich abundance of wisdom. Joy is surfacing. Like a seed through concrete cracks. Strength to fulfil good intentions is arising. I am travelling so the real test will be when I get home. But from this spot, free with each day and calling any new spot home, the rich fruit of life is calling me to enjoy it to the full and to take as many with me as I can.

Thursday, 28 January 2010

What they said was nothing that had not been said before: You looked around the room at faces blank as if groaning, as singing is to a hum, with mouth closed. You heard the words: "You are not good enough" as the man at the top spoke to you from his black leather chair. Pools of light splashed onto the long table marking the journey of his voice from him to you.

It's funny because those words left his mouth but they reverberated around your head as the faces conformed the judgement you were being asked:

"Do you measure up?"

"Are you one of us?"

The answer to each was "No."

The meeting told you that were accepted as part of the team but perhaps this was not the best place for you. You could spread your wings elsewhere and had you ever thought about acting? Because you have great ideas but difficulty on keeping them focused on the business message (defined last week in hot debate at the management team meeting, they ate a Chinese afterwards and told the news to us by email).

You are careless stubborn and confused and we'll find you funny beause it's easier than taking you seriously . Your words might stick and cause discomfort and that is not what we are about.

We are about you ignoring yourself.

~ o ~

Leaving the office that evening and negotiating glass doors, wooden floors and the forgotten concrete staircase down to the floor, he had never felt more free. Snow that had fallen for five weeks in Amsterdam had solidified as comfort in his mind. On the staircase he had passed a colleague on his way up heading back for some overtime, his face as white as your that morning. Steps echo and out in the car park/forecourt/luxury space for a city it's short steps to the cigar cocoon of a train and passengers reading identical newspapers. The new place will be good, he thinks, relieved he's been let go, it's all he can think of now. A woman across from him glances attractively and down at a book which you frustrate to see th cover of; she'll unsettle you for the journey and you won;t have the courage to ask.

~ o ~

Hers was a hip that ran like sand between your fingers. The train conversation had gone better (!) than expected and bubbling confident woman -Cindy - had felt it was the kind of night when innocent men on trains dined out on their luck. You were led and didn't push and she eased you into bars and Utrecht and pushed you with words about aspiration and high tec calibre if world understanding and you intrigued because you could match her on Beirut, on Haiti and even outscore her on Addis Ababa although the light in her eyes (green) suggested she knew more about these things by looking at you than you did yourself. Feminine mystique pouring all over you and lamps spewed yellow cotton tufts and forced its way into comfortable spaces and leather seats and the cement mortar gaps between layers of slate on the one wall. The entire other was a mirror.

~ o ~

Lady you shocked me with a lipas I passed you for the bathroom and now I am stumbling backwards with one hand to hold myself up on the table, hoping that too won't tilt and the bladder will have to wait and you have a hold of me on the leather seat next to you.

Turned, I can't can't resist and do not wish to as we pull back and giggle and pay and leave and now your hand rests on her hips and gently she's awake and it's 4am and the two of you slept contentedly in folds but then a stir and a half street light on your faces you're reaching for eachother and cascading morning soaks the two of you in sheets cast aside as you search for the other in a cacophony of whisper-coated glances an grins subside to moans and kindness and resting again in folds: the hope and tragic parting you're encountering, even while together, becuase it cannot be like this again. The sweet pain of a sunrise of holding and Oh God, please don't let it be like this again. And all the rest can only be a memory - a reliving of the sweetness of this night.

Did I mention her hair? It was brown and long, eyes like the green of summer and you told her in shadows that if she felt like another she could take his number and call at any time.

She did and bought you icecream and politely told you no.

It wouldn't happen because like waves rolling into a beach and reflected off a cliff face you had met, crested and rolled on your way.

Funny how the boss had not put it that way and rolling on you're contented down a different set of stairs, a more tragically paved street. You're free again and all the wishing brings you down.

And besides. Kristy said she would marry you and her appartment is a block and a half away. You'll pop in after a coffee by the river.

Thursday, 7 January 2010

What perplexes me, he said, is that if there is a state of being that is beyond all change, and I am supposed to working towards that, how come events have such an impact on how I feel day to day and the things that I am able to do?

A comment that someone needs me, a compliment from my manager, a phone call from a girlfriend, a really great piece of writing. These have an impact on how I actually am and what I able to then do. IE the energy from a walk in the forest gives me power to do well at work.

I guess the issue is a lack of trust that there I cannot experience this independent quality and then when I have glimpsed it, it is so delicate that is beyond the reach of every day. That there is not a confidence in THAT in all that I do.

I am so struck that delicacy of this all consuming power, how a whisper can break it, an eyelash remove it from view.

And I deeply long for it and know that longing itself is what keeps it obscure.

Presses down onto the tabletop with his thumb. It goes white and he looks at me straight with the open anguish of a man who does not doubt his words.

Tuesday, 29 December 2009

I've been thinking of Copenhagen and a supposed failure of the world to do what is right. I have been thinking fo the interests involved and find it surprising that many heavy weights are launched behind environmentalism. This does not make them our allies, beloved friends, remember who they are and what interests they present.

Remember Al Gore and his niche as political saviour all the while touting the establishment of a mechanism that distorts the flow of money from development to God knows where. I am referring here to the $4.3bn that was raised for $100 bn of on the ground projects.

And this before the fact we consider the hypocrisy of using a market to cure something that is essentially market-created.

The trading of carbon of done because it is easy to measure and has diffrentials of output around the world. If we're going to get environmental, let's a make a fast busk of it. Or else, create labyrinthine structures so obscure no one knows who wins. I pick Gore because he was one of the chief proponents. I am sure he's not alone: this is a mechanism bigger than any he could propose.

What happens in a carbin market is that the those with excess supply of carbon (equiliberally defined) and excess demand for carbon will not lose. The market creators will. The financiers, and traders and advisers on policy who...

just happen to have funded the election of Barack Obama. His creation by the people is a myth. His record on small sum donations was worse than George Bush.

Barack Obama had no interest in forcing through a deal at Copenhagen, even if the US Senate had granted him the privilege. The goodwill generated by Copenhagen, though temporarily thwarted, will be used to take the next best (though first best for his funders) route: carbon trading.

As George W. Bush made a party for his friends in Iraq, so will Barack in the upper echelons of high finance, with marginal benefits for the environment.

I don't blame Barack for this, he's doing as any president has done in the past and most in the future will but let's clear the bubble of expectation if it has not already popped. His interests are not yours, not are they aligned to the common good of humanity.

As if to underline my point, the Yemenis are receiving his special forces help. Overtly it's for training the army of the near to failed state but likely they'll be cooking up some juice of their own.

And why? This is part of the Pentagon's Long War. No brain child of Obama's but published by the Pentagon in 2006. Rahm Emmanuel, Obama's Chief of Staff, did however devote a whole book in favour of the topic. It is the 21st century's equivalent of the Project for the New American Century, but in place of Shock and Awe they have Stealth and wealth.

By providing security to many vulnerbale countries, Barack will have them in his pocket and his markets under his belt. By reiterating the myth of the war on terror the scene is set for an endless war against an unseen enemy. And special forces escalations in supossedly vulnerable countries will create a fast-reaction network of awesome power and incredible global reach.

It's the ultimate zeitgeist - out of sight and everywhere - and the man's still being praised to high heaven because we don't know where else to put our hope.

It's not that I want to create fury, just to dispel a lie and I am sick to the hind teeth of people making excuses for a charlatan with big words.

Wake up for yourselves, change your selves, transform your communities. Don't waste years clinging on to the hope of another idle dictator and use your inspiration to benefit each other not the short-termist ambitions of another desperate emperor.

~~~

China too has been in the news, on Western front pages for the lock up of a human rights activist who was too outspoken about political freedoms in China. The issue of Len X__ is not an issue, but the way it is reported is.

Of th west's remainign ideals, democracy is unquestionable. It does not matter how contrived, how influenced or how much it is controlled, we are able to trot out the doctrine that democracy is best. At risk of sounding like Churchill, it probably is, but not with the dismal levels of participation and transparency we currently enjoy. However, the Times can get haughty about it and don't forget those free voters are free consumers and freer markets can be overtaken as surely as day becomes night.

It is a universal truth, the desire to be free and no doubt China will one day open its doors to another grade of governance that better expresses the will of its people. But it enrages me to think of a haughty Western press, lazily comatose in their superior vision of the world, thinking that our system is free from control. It is deep and embedded in constructs just outside of your vision to make you think you're making a decision. In the large part it will be happy, but repetitive so collectively we choose to be over-entertained and underwhelmed by the lack of what is important. The real wealth: conditions for a good life, so its peaceful happy accidents can happen. This is the business of governments but the psychic deluge we're subjected to is nothing more than to comfort us with an uneasy peace. And cloak us from what's really going on. Which is...

more than I am succinctly able to say or understand. Whenever I've gone down that track I find myself embedded in folk-lore and at straws to explain gross conundrums. David Icke and his kin give much food for thought and occupy space the other outlets ignore. But in as much as they inspire us to question that what is presented is unlikely to be what is going on, I am happy to go no further, just relay my impression of the tide of forces as I see them.